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Epitaph for the ‘War on Terror’

Avenging 9/11 and preventing its recurrence was justification for putting enormous effort and money into unrelated or even counterproductive activities the ruling class sold to us as antiterrorism. By Angelo Codevilla

September 16, 2021

Twenty years after the U.S. government declared war on terrorism, it consummated its own defeat in Kabul and Washington, in a manner foreseeable, foreseen, and foreshadowed in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Fixation on itself and unseriousness about war are the twin habits of heart and mind that disposed the ruling class to defeat. The practical explanation for why and how it accepted defeat is found in the overriding interest each part of the ruling class has in doing what it wants to do. 

On the night of September 11, 2001, Muslim governments strictly forbade public celebrations of the carnage. The Palestinian Authority, anticipating that outraged Americans would destroy them to avenge the day’s events, even called the attacks al nachba—“the disaster.” But as the U.S. ruling class made clear that it was accepting defeat, the Muslim world’s media and streets celebrated.

Two decades later, after that defeat’s logic had worked its way through and transformed American life, and as the government’s self-humiliating exit from Afghanistan consummated it, much of mankind followed Muslim crowds in celebrating—including prominent Americans. 

At the “War On Terror’s” end as at its beginning, the same authoritative Americans—including Republican President George W. Bush as well as leading Democrats—blamed fellow Americans at least as much as foreign powers for it. 

Bush’s first post 9/11 act (other than to sequester information about Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s role in terrorism) was to declare Islam the “religion of peace” and to declare illegitimate any American who thought otherwise. Fast forward to September 11, 2021 and Bush said that these Americans, many of whom had gone to war for him, losing life or limb, are “children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” 

Similarly, in Joe Biden’s view the American people had shown “Fear and resentment of . . . true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.” He called them “the dark forces of human nature.”

Shirking the Reality of War To Promote Ruling Class Interests

Progressive thought had always looked away from the reality of war as the midwife of nations and the gravedigger of decadences. Kissinger wrote that America should only fight “wars that it could afford to lose”—as if there were such things. Thus it blurred distinctions between war and peace. Intellectually crippled in this way, U.S. military forces therefore have not aimed for victory. about:blankabout:blank

Instead and because of this, military operations have been planned and executed on the basis of what will fulfill our foreign policy establishment’s personal and institutional interests, as well as its evolving ideological criteria. Contact with reality, having produced results very different from those the ruling class envisions, that class explains defeat in terms of its most fundamental animosities—toward its domestic competitors. 

Thus as the Afghan Taliban celebrated with the armament the ruling class left behind for them, making them the world’s fourth best armed force, our ruling class turned to its next primary objective. 

Treating the American people, especially conservatives, as the main threat results from the growth and clarification of attitudes endemic to Progressivism and already translated into policy and lack thereof by such luminaries as Dean Acheson, William Fulbright, Robert McNamara, Jimmy Carter, Anthony Lake, (Obama’s original mentor on national security,) and even by Henry Kissinger. Many among them identified with William Appleman Williams’s thesis (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959) that America was on the wrong side of the Cold War. America’s defeat by foreigners does not threaten these progressives’ prerogatives and identities as do their domestic rivals. 

Blaming domestic rivals to deflect defeat’s consequences in foreign wars is all too usual. Nevertheless, statements by Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley that “domestic extremists,” whom they functionally define as whomever opposes the ruling class, pose the greatest danger of terrorism—especially if they are white—is egregious in history. The official reorientation of the U.S. armed forces’ focus on fighting what is arguably the American people’s majority, is even more so. A grassroots progressive group called the Democratic Coalition leaves no doubt about the ruling class’s 2021 practical agenda: “we cannot rest until all of Trump’s traitorous, insurrectionist foot soldiers face justice.” Insofar as they are serious, and even if they are not, this augurs civil war.

How did this happen?about:blank

Having blurred the distinction between peace and war ab initio, and caring less than they should about national integrity, the ruling class never saw terrorism as war—as anything that should interfere with their agendas. But there is no such thing as a small war, any more than a small pregnancy. All war, all political violence, is about whether a body politic lives or dies. No post-9/11 statement is more mistaken than that these attacks “changed everything” in America. On the contrary. They accelerated the growth of trends deeply rooted in the ruling class. 

The ruling class’ blurring of distinction between peace and war had already disposed it to tolerate what Kamal Nasser and the PLO were doing to Israel and what the Soviet Union was doing all over the world. Were we not doing similar things in the Cold War world? Well, not really. Our national security establishment relished the game, but was neither authorized nor ready to play the indirect-warfare game for blood. They had few if any independently recruited foreign sources. The closest they came to the game was in supporting the likes of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, neglecting that these had their own agendas. 

Besides, in the 1960s it was all too easy to turn a blind eye to the airplane hijackings, bombings, and bank robberies that Americans in league with Castro and the Soviets were perpetrating in the United States. But as America’s acceptance of defeat in Vietnam loomed, the terrorist threat increased. By the mid-1990s, after the U.S. government had misfired in Iraq, it was becoming hard to ignore.  

Why Should a Little War Interrupt Their Good Time?

The ruling class’ first and enduring reaction to 9/11 was to safeguard its relationships with the “Third World” operatives in whom it had invested so many hopes, and in whose support and management its members were spending billions of dollars and and reaping millions. That is why when the American people demanded the heads of everybody and anybody who had a hand in terrorism, it was essential for CIA director George Tenet officially to identify the terrorist problem with one man, one organization, and with non-political religious zeal. The point was: don’t even think of fighting against anyone else. 

And, within the ruling class, all rejected even considering “Why have we Americans been targeted more and more by all manner of terrorists? What must we do to put a stop to that?” “Whoever suggests that we hold foreign governments responsible for inciting violence against Americans wants war with the world. Can’t have that.” That is why, in the aftermath of a defeat that indicts the whole class’ conception and execution of policy for two decades, the lead editorials of the leading establishment publications, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal pleaded: “We don’t recall good alternatives being offered over the last 20 years.” Correct! Groupthink stood guard lest reality intrude. 

Calling what happened next “strategy” does violence to the English language and to whomever cares to peruse the newspapers circa 2001-3, which reported who in the government’s various parts and among their supporters wanted to do or not to do, plus what labels they might use and what information should be withheld to manage public opinion. But you will search in vain for any discussion of why so many people in so many places were finding it attractive to kill Americans, and how we might make it unattractive. 

Instead, the U.S. government/ruling class wanted to get closer to foreign countries to improve them and their attitudes, and it wanted to impose restrictions on Americans. Because that is what it always wanted and did whenever it could. Avenging 9/11 and preventing its recurrence served as justification for putting enormous effort and money into unrelated or even counterproductive activities the ruling class sold to Americans as antiterrorism. about:blankabout:blank

The force behind these absurd-on-their-face, focus-grouped sales pitches came from the unanimity and lack of discussion with which the ruling class media pushed them. Twenty years later, the same media repeated the same tropes as if events had confirmed them. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan had “largely succeeded” in keeping the terrorists “on defense so they found it harder to attack us at home.” A few days earlier Condoleezza Rice, as responsible for these occupations as anyone, had written that “We took the fight to the terrorists so that they could never again bring it home to us.” 

On what planet? Afghanistan and Iraq were awash in ethnic militias intent on oppressing or killing one another. Few of the combatants had ever heard of the United States. But our ruling class wants us to believe that hatred for America had so crazed them that, instead of slipping across our porous borders and feasting on undefended civilians, they threw themselves at the U.S armed forces in their country. They really think we are stupid. 

Cui Bono?

Estimates of the “War on Terror’s” cost in money start at $8-10 trillion. Cui bono? To whom did that money go? Yes, millions, maybe even billions, went to rent the cooperation of Iraqis, Afghans, etc. But the trillions went chiefly to Americans—to the national security establishment; the armed forces and intelligence community, for enhanced careers and operations, and to their contractors; plus to the horde of civilian specialists employed to improve health, education, welfare, and social practices in foreign lands; our transportation network; and all manner of manufacturing and servicing. The consultant class also took it to the bank, and the people who run the conferences. 

Think of all the reputations, careers, retirements on the golf course, second homes, fancy cars and vacations all this made possible. 

Think also of how fast and far the “War on Terror” advanced the ruling class’ perennial objective to limit the freedoms of Americans outside its orbit, and perhaps shut down domestic opposition. about:blank

When leftist Americans (alumni of Americans for a Democratic Society, a covert CIA subsidiary) hijacked airliners to Cuba, the ruling class would not hear of ending the problem by forcing Castro to give them up. Instead, they made it a crime for ordinary air travelers to defend themselves. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security set about establishing a new way of life in America, based on badges and regulations about what clearance would be needed to go where. The ruling class cares nothing of their effect (or, overwhelmingly, the lack thereof) on terrorism, just as it does not care what effect its shifting, contradictory mandates concerning COVID have on public health. And it does not even try to explain how adding minuscule amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere adversely affects the planet’s climate. No. The ruling class takes any and all occasions to advance its overriding objective in its own domination. 

Terrorism, however, is especially useful. The premise that since we cannot know who is most likely to pose threats, that hence we must refrain from focusing on (profiling) Muslims and assume that the folks next door are as capable of mayhem as anyone shouting Allahu Akbar, has done much to make America what it is today. Especially because it is an in-your-face lie. The lie serves to free the ruling class to absolve or indict for terrorism whomever it chooses. 

Surprise, surprise! Turns out that not everyone is as likely a source of terrorism as anyone else. The real, congenital, terrorists are conservative white folks. U.S intelligence properly profiles them to prevent the worst of them from taking part in society. And if anyone suggests that this relates to the fact that these white folks don’t vote for the Democratic Party, the Wall Street Journal tells us that the U.S. justice system is fair and competent: “The privacy of Americans hasn’t been threatened, while the Patriot Act has provided the feds with tools to break up domestic terror cells.” You must believe that, or else! 

That is why the New York Times formulated the “War on Terror’s” official epitaph: “A War on Terror Accounting Since 9/11. The fall of Kabul shouldn’t obscure the successes over 20 years. Experts say it is the success of a multilateral effort that extends to as many as 85 countries.”

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About Angelo Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).ArchivePhoto: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

[Mostly agree. Would point out that Col. Petrokhin, KGB, in a history of the KGB, “The Sword and the Shield,” the KGB had a significant role in fostering and growing the SDS and other Viet Nam era leftist groups and activities. A point to make on cui bono, who has profited from all of the social welfare programs since 1967? Certainly the people of South Chicago have not benefited from the 3+Trillion Dollars spent there on their behalf, nor those in Queens County NYC nor Los Angeles County in CA. Note how Jeremiah Wright, a ‘Christian’ minister, ended up with a ten million dollar pension and a house on a golf course on the North Shore of Chicago. And, so it goes … .

Poke through the blog, check out the post on the Q’Ran, on secession, and the one on the inbreeding of Muslims and how it has affected the various European national healthcare systems, to which Obamacare is heading us.]

Awesome Pixs

Cui Bono? Who Benefits From the Afghanistan Withdrawal?

Foreign policy abhors vacuums, and the United States has now created one.By Dennis Prager

August 31, 2021

How does a leader decide what to do?

The most logical response is: “Cui bono?”—”Who benefits” from the decision?

If some policy benefits your country most, you should, within moral bounds, pursue it.

If your enemies benefit most, you should avoid it.

I’d be curious to learn what answer proponents of America leaving Afghanistan—conservative or liberal—would give to the question, “Cui bono?”

I can say that until this moment, I have not read or heard a single cogent argument from proponents of American withdrawal as to how exactly it benefits America.

“Twenty years is too long,” or its variant, “we have to end these endless wars,” the most commonly offered argument for withdrawal, has nothing to do with benefiting America.about:blankabout:blank

It is an emotional sentiment, not a rational argument.

The withdrawal has already cost us in a single day more service members’ lives than we lost on any one day in Afghanistan since June 2014, seven years ago.

The number of American servicemen killed in Afghanistan per year from 2015 to 2020 is respectively 22, 9, 14, 14, 21, and 11. No one can seriously argue that we are leaving Afghanistan because of high American casualties.

So, while America doesn’t benefit at all from leaving Afghanistan, it does get hurt.

The damage to the reputation of America—as an ally and as a strong country—is not easily overstated.

God’s Wife IT WILL KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF  I especially liked number 5! Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he was asked to judge.  The purpose of the Contest was to find the most caring child.       The winner was: 1.  A four-year-old child, whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman, who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old Gentleman’s’ yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.    When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy just said, ‘Nothing, I just Helped him cry.’   *********************************************   2.  Teacher Debbie Moon’s first graders were discussing a picture of a family. One little boy in the picture had a different hair color than the other members. One of her students suggested that he was adopted.    A little girl said, ‘I know all about Adoption, I was adopted..’      ‘What does it mean to be adopted?’, asked   another child.        ‘It means’, said the girl, ‘that you grew in your mommy’s heart instead of her tummy!’   ************************ *********************   3.      On my way home one day, I stopped to watch a Little League base ball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first- base line, I asked one of the boys what the score was     ‘We’re behind 14 to nothing,’ he answered  With a smile.     ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I have to say you don’t look very discouraged.’     ‘Discouraged?’, the boy asked with a Puzzled look on his face…   ‘Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t Been up to bat yet.’   *********************** **********************   4. Whenever I’m disappointed with my spot in life, I stop and think about little Jamie Scott.       Jamie was trying out for a part in the school play. His mother told me that he’d set his heart on being in it, though she feared he would not be chosen..            On the day the parts were awarded, I went with her to collect him after school. Jamie rushed up to her, eyes shining with pride and excitement..  ‘Guess what, Mom,’ he shouted, and then said those words that will remain a lesson to me….’I’ve been chosen to clap and cheer.’   *********************************************   5.    An eye witness account from New York City , on a cold day in December,  some years ago: A little boy, about 10-years-old, was standing before a shoe store on the roadway, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering With cold.      A lady approached the young boy and said,   ‘My, but you’re in such deep thought staring in that window!’   ‘I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes,’ was the boy’s reply.      The lady took him by the hand, went into   the store, and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her.   She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with the towel.    By this time, the clerk had returned with the socks.. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes..         She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. She patted him on the head and said, ‘No doubt, you will be more comfortable now..’      As she turned to go, the astonished kid caught her by the hand, and looking up into her face, with tears in his eyes, asked her:  ‘Are you God’s wife?’   *********************************************   SEND TO ALL WHO LOVE AND CARE FOR CHILDREN.   Hope this put a smile on your face itSure did mine!

August 20, 2021

Why Joe Biden can’t resign, or be removed — or die

By Clayton Spann

In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, demands have arisen in Congress for President Biden to resign or to be removed via the 25th Amendment.  Elements of the formerly pro-Biden media have joined in the condemnation.

Many silent Democrat office-holders likely want Biden out, as they fear that the systemic incompetence of his administration will bring them down come 2022.

But Joe cannot resign or be fired.  The Democrat high command will not let either happen, no matter the short-term political cost.

On the surface, that makes little sense.  Joe’s resignation or removal would not alter Democrat control of the presidency and Congress.  If Joe leaves, Kamala Harris becomes president.  She is incompetent, too, but no more so than Joe, and is on board with the administration’s radical agenda.

So.  Why can’t Joe quit the office or be removed? 

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”  The current Senate is equally divided with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

As soon as Kamala Harris takes the presidential oath, the vice presidency is left vacant.  In that case, a tie vote means that the legislation, resolution, or confirmation under consideration fails.

A Senate chamber without a vice president puts Mitch McConnell in the catbird seat.  He can kill all Democrat initiatives, including any nomination to refill the vice presidency.

The Democrat agenda goes up in smoke.  The 3.5-trillion-dollar budget reconciliation bill is blocked.  The For the People bill is blocked.  The Green New Deal is blocked.  Packing the Supreme Court is dead.  As is any attempt to scuttle the filibuster or grab guns.

Therefore, the Democrats will keep Joe in office.  Even if he’s reduced to talking gibberish and eating Jell-O.  Kamala also stays where she is, and the Democrat dream of fundamental transformation remains alive.

OK.  But what if Joe Biden dies?  This 78-year-old man is certainly at risk.  When Joe was three decades younger, in 1988, he suffered two brain aneurysms.  Doctors at the time gave him a 50-50 chance of surviving.

“He’s not a healthy guy,” said Dr. David Scheiner in 2020.  Dr. Scheiner was concerned about Biden’s potential for a stroke.  Biden receives treatment for an irregular heartbeat and high cholesterol.  Joe has also undergone surgeries for gallbladder and partial prostate removal, and on his sinus and nasal passages to treat sleep apnea.

If Joe dies, Kamala automatically vacates the vice presidency.  The Democrats again face the throttling of their agenda.  Mitch again rules.

The Democrat high command are not stupid.  Indeed, as they proved during the last presidential election, they are quite willing to do whatever needs to be done.  We must assume they have contingency plans in place.

If Joe were to expire while addressing the United Nations or during a live press conference, that would be one thing.  His death must be acknowledged and the consequences accepted.

If Joe passes while out of sight of the public, that is something else.  The something else would probably go like this:

His body is secretly transported to Camp David or the family compound in Delaware.  His sudden disappearance is explained by announcing that an assassination plot (by Islamic terrorists, or better, by white supremacists) has just been discovered.  The president will remain at an undisclosed location until the threat is neutralized.

Biden’s existence and whereabouts can be easily faked, so the pretense could be kept up a while.  Also remember that a president need not actually sign a bill for it to become law (if Congress remains in session ten days after passage).

With Joe presumably alive and Kamala able to break Senate tie votes, the Democrats have a window of about sixteen months to enact their agenda.  Only recalcitrants Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stand in the way.  The party that plays the hardest ball ever seen will go to work hard on those two.

The window ends January 3, 2023, when the new Congress convenes.  Almost certainly the GOP will control the next House, and the Republicans stand an increasingly good chance to take back the Senate.  If not passed, the Democrat agenda is truly dead as of that date.

While the window remains open, Joseph Robinette Biden must remain president.  Whether he serves honorably or dishonorably, whether coherently or incoherently, whether alive or dead. 

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[Got a query about ‘Black Swan’, so these last three posts show that a nuke attack may not be the only cause, but simply a loss of faith in the fiat dollar.]

Home | Wire | The End of the Sound Economy

The End of the Sound Economy

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14 COMMENTS

TAGS Money and Banks

• LEE ESTO EN ESPAÑOL

08/16/2021Doug French

Murray Rothbard made the point to us in his US Economic History class at UNLV that economic downturns used to be called “panics.” But, the government believed that word to be too scary for the general public, so, “depression” began to be used to describe downturns. Then, the word “depression” was felt to be, well, too depressing, so “recession” was substituted in and is now employed, and as was the case of 2008, “great recession” was rolled out. The March 2020 economic belly flop was the “pandemic recession,” only lasting two months. 

Raoul Pal of Real Vision makes the point in describing the events of last March, “So, you get this weird world where we just had the shortest recession in all recorded history which happens to be the biggest recession in all recorded history because they stopped it by throwing money at it.”

Government, through the workings of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will not allow us to suffer. Or, as practitioners of Austrian economics would put it, allow malinvestments to be cleared away and the economy’s health to be restored. Pal says, “We are not allowed persistent bad news. And why is that? It’s because the world is hyper leveraged. And if you allow the value of the collateral which are the assets to fall, then leverage becomes unserviceable. So, that’s the general rule of thumb. So, what happens if economic growth gets weak and assets start falling, these are the fixed assets that you use as collateral, that’s real estate, equities, bonds, stuff like that, the moment any of those start moving, the Federal Reserve stimulates or stops it, because it can’t be allowed.”

So, the money mandarins will do all in their power if they sniff, not just a recession, but if they believe the country’s, the world’s, or everyday people’s collateral might just be in danger of falling in value enough to make the mountain of debt undercollateralized, to prop up asset values. “And throwing money at it, I believe, devalues the denominator which is the price of fiat money or the value of the purchasing power of fiat money against these assets, ” Pal explains. “So, that means optically, no assets ever go down, like the Venezuelan stock market never goes down.”

There may be no food on the shelves in Venezuela, but the one-year return of the Caracas Stock Exchange Index is 1,203.08 percent.

The US may not be Venezuela anytime soon, but, as Pal says, “We crossed the Rubicon in 2008. We crossed a different Rubicon in 2020. And we’re never going back. And so, recessions are not allowed. Whatever that means. And asset prices are not allowed to fall either of any magnitude, let’s call it 15% or for any duration. So, it can’t go down and stay down because it’s not allowed any longer, because the system can’t take it.”

The US economy has become hyperfinancialized, says Pal. If the S&P 500 goes down, employees are laid off. And, we all know that one of the Fed’s mandates is maximizing employment. “It’s like nothing will last long because the Fed will not allow it to.”

Pal continues, “so let’s play that out. You are now a policymaker. You’re Janet Yellen and you’re Jay Powell. You’re meeting in a room, having a coffee, and saying, really pretty good to me. We might have found the secret weapon to stop recessions ever happening again. So, is your propensity now increasing or decreasing to do more of the same in any trouble? Obviously, you think it works now. So, you will do more.”

More is exactly what they shouldn’t do, but Rothbard foresaw what the Yellens and the Powells would do, writing in Libertarian Forum, “ … any hint of recession causes the government to panic and turn on the inflationary taps once again. … given any inflationary boom, a recession is painful but necessary, in order to return the economy to a sound state.”

A sound state is nowhere in sight. Author:

Doug French

Douglas French is former president of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master’s degree in economics from UNLV, studying under both Professor Murray Rothbard and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Home | Wire | Bretton Woods and the Spoliation of Europe

Bretton Woods and the Spoliation of Europe

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15 COMMENTS

TAGS World HistoryGold Standard

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08/19/2021Kristoffer Mousten Hansen

Having marked the quinquagenary of the destruction of the gold standard Sunday, August 15, it is natural to be a little nostalgic for the Bretton Woods system. After all, it might not have been the classical gold standard, but at least it wasn’t as bad as the fiat standard that succeeded it. As sites such as wtfhappenedin1971.com document, that year indeed looks to be a turning point in the economic history of the West. However, the suspension of convertibility of dollars into gold was simply the logical outcome of the system. The PhD standard was not an arrangement that emerged by default in 1971, as governments tried desperately to patch up the international monetary system before its final breakdown in 1973; Bretton Woods was itself the original ideal of government controlling and carefully managing monetary affairs scientifically.

Bretton Woods and Managed Money

The social engineering was on full display when international delegations from forty-four nations came to the resort town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 to agree on how the international monetary system should be set up after the world war. However, in reality the system was an American diktat; while the Europeans were not completely without influence, they were all either bankrupt or still occupied by German soldiers, whereas the Americans were now creditors to the world and sitting on a pile of gold that had flowed into the country in the 1930s and during the war. As Ben Steill documents in his account of the conference, the system agreed upon was essentially that proposed by Harry Dexter White, the creature of Henry Morgenthau.1 The (more) inflationary plan proposed by John Maynard Keynes was never really a serious alternative, although the arrogant and insufferable behavior of Keynes at the conference probably didn’t do the British any favors.

The system was essentially one of managed, convertible currencies. The currencies of the participating countries were to be convertible into dollars at a fixed rate, and foreign central banks could redeem dollar claims into gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce. Thus, a gigantic inflation machine was created: the Americans could increase the supply of dollars with little restraint, since foreign central banks would then use dollar reserves as the basis for their own expansion of the domestic money supply. The watchword for all these deliberations and negotiations was “liquidity,” as the emerging Keynesian orthodoxy lived in mortal fear of a lack of liquidity. Of course, what this meant in reality was that the more inflationary countries wanted someone else to finance the inevitable balance of payments deficits. The Keynes Plan’s only substantial difference from the White Plan was the British wish for more liquidity to finance their balance of payments through Keynes’s International Clearing Union scheme, which would have funded balance of payments deficits and issued its own paper currency, the “bancor”—in other words, a scheme to make the foreigners (i.e., the Americans) bear the burden of British inflation.

The Bretton Woods system began operating in 1945, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was set up. American officials were generally in favor of a return to freer trade and financial flows, managed through the new international institutions, of course. Yet while Bretton Woods was officially in operation, there was not much trade going on. Understandable, perhaps, when Europe was only emerging from the war in 1945, but as the forties dragged on, revival of international commerce still seemed distant. This is partly explained by the lingering command economies in Europe. The social democrats now in power were loath to abolish the totalitarian economic controls they had inherited from the Nazi occupiers (or had often enough themselves first instituted in the 1930s), thus stifling any sound economic development. Most famously, German economic revival began in 1948 with the abolition practically overnight of price controls.

Dollar “Shortage” and the European Payments Union

Problems in international trade persisted, however, as the Europeans simply had no dollars with which to buy American goods. There was a dollar shortage across Europe, and the new professional economists wrote volumes upon volumes of commentary on this. The problem of a lack of liquidity seemed bound to persist. At least partially, the Marshall Plan was an attempt to give a boost to trade: if the Europeans didn’t have the money to buy American goods, the Americans would have to lend it to them.

This was a complete misdiagnosis. In international trade as elsewhere, to appropriate a line from Jean-Baptiste Say, commodities exchange for commodities. The general poverty of Europe was not, as such, the cause of the dollar shortage, as it would simply take time to rebuild production capabilities. Yet why was there a lack of dollars to carry on trade? Simply because the central planners at Bretton Woods and in the new planning bureaucracies had blundered: European exchange rates were fixed at too high a level vis-à-vis the dollar. Effectively, Europe was starved of dollars, because European currencies were overvalued, and thus European commodities could not exchange for American commodities, as the medium of exchange was lacking. Therefore, only foreign aid was possible, as there was no other way for Europeans to acquire the needed dollars.

Intra-European trade revived more quickly, as the European Payments Union (EPU; 1950–58) allowed the participating countries to clear claims and counterclaims against each other. Every country kept a balance with the EPU in “European Units of Account,” defined as 0.888671 grams of gold, the supposed gold content of one dollar. Every month, the EPU would clear claims and counterclaims and each country would have to settle the net claim on it with the EPU (or receive a credit to its account, as the case may have been). The monthly clearing ensured that the EPU did not devolve into the liquidity machine the Keynesians dreamed of, although modest sums could be borrowed to offset short-term fluctuations in the balance of payments. European currencies were still not convertible into dollars, however, and the Bretton Woods system was thus in reality still not in operation, but this changed in 1958. Ironically, the author of the reforms that finally made the system work was the French economist Jacques Rueff, who would soon become its harshest critic.

The Short Life of Bretton Woods, 1958–71

President Charles de Gaulle had charged his finance minister with balancing the budget, and the finance minister in turn set up a commission headed by Rueff that proposed more expansive plans to restore France to economic health.2 The details of the Rueff Plan do not concern us here. What matters is that as part of the reforms the French franc was devalued. As the exchange rate was fixed at too high a level, either devaluation or severe deflation was necessary. Since domestic prices reflected the true value of the franc, the only sensible policy was devaluation. With one stroke, in December 1958, Rueff removed the main remaining obstacle to convertibility (the UK had already devalued the pound in 1949, while the German mark, hard money compared to the dollar and the pound, was periodically revalued). The Bretton Woods system could finally function, only fourteen years after the conference.

No sooner had it begun functioning than the system proved unsustainable. Dollar claims now began piling up in Europe that could finance American imports. On the classical gold standard, the net outflow of dollars to Europe would have caused a contraction in the American monetary base and in the credit superstructure, but in the Bretton Woods System, foreign central banks were supposed to consider dollars and dollar claims (i.e., US Treasurys) as good as gold. Whether by design or accident, the Bretton Woods inflation machine was now in motion.

Jacques Rueff started attacking the system as soon as the early 1960s. American expansion was clearly unsustainable, as European central banks soon began redeeming their dollar claims. Political pressure was not enough to keep dollars in Europe. Yet the consequences of the system were not limited to a drain of American gold that could empty Fort Knox within a decade or two. Redemption was simply the last escape the Europeans had. They had been tied into what Rueff himself—a great friend and admirer of the US—called an “unprecedented system of spoliation.”3 As they were forced to hold depreciating dollar assets, creditor nations—France and Germany being the most prominent—were forced to subsidize Americans’ asset purchasing in Europe and to partially finance the prestige projects and foreign policy of the American government. The international monetary system agreed on in Bretton Woods proved to be simply a means of control and exploitation, no less real because it was invisible to or misunderstood by most Europeans.

The true significance of the closing of the gold window in 1971 now emerges. Gold had been included in the plans for the system because of the veneer of solidity it gave, and because most planners, Harry White among them, could not yet conceive of a monetary order not based on gold. But now the American government and the special interests waxing fat off American inflation and the spoliation of Europe were faced with a stark choice: defend the remaining gold reserves by renouncing inflationary policy or abandon the role of gold entirely. From the point of view of shortsighted politicos controlled by special interests, that was an easy choice to make.

The end of gold did not mean the end of Bretton Woods, however: the Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971 attempted to institute a system of fixed exchange rates with no anchor in gold at all. This only lasted until February 1973, when the Bretton Woods system was abandoned de facto. Bureaucratic institutions being what they are, this was not officially ratified until January 1976, when the IMF decreed that the price of gold was allowed to float, recognizing the state of affairs existing since 1971.

Yet the dollar standard is still the basis for the international monetary system, and dollar claims are the principal component of international reserves. Far from being the end of the dollar standard, closing the gold window opened the way for continuing spoliation. Americans can buy assets and goods from the rest of the world without offering anything real in return. They do not have to produce in order to exchange; they can simply borrow. This is true in general and partly explains the high standard of living enjoyed by Americans, but the benefits accrue principally to the financial and political elites at the center of the system. The dollar standard keeps US government debt in high demand, as it is the principal reserve asset of foreign central banks, and US financial centers prosper due to the inflow of foreign capital. The much touted “depth” of American capital markets here have a ready explanation.

Conclusion

There was nothing inevitable or necessary about the dollar standard. Nothing stood in the way of reestablishing a proper gold standard at the end of World War II. In the 1950s, Ludwig von Mises explained that each country simply had to abstain from inflationary policy and make its currency convertible into gold at the market rate of exchange.4 This would have prevented not only supposed dollar shortages and balance of payments problems, but it would have prevented the system of spoliation and the social and economic deformations that go with it.5 Even the apparent beneficiaries of the system, the American people, would be better off in the long run with a sound international monetary order.

• 1.Ben Steill, The Battle for Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
• 2.Christopher S. Chivvis, The Monetary Conservative: Jacques Rueff and Twentieth Century Free Market Thought (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
• 3.Jacques Rueff, The Monetary Sin of the West (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 191.
• 4.Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), part 4, “Monetary Reconstruction.” Part 4 was written in 1952 for the new edition.
• 5.I describe some of these in my article: Kristoffer Hansen, “The Populist Case for the Gold Standard,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 323–61.

Author:

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen is a research assistant at the Institute for Economic Policy at Leipzig University and a PhD candidate at the University of Angers. He is also a Mises Institute research fellow. 

Pg 3 of today’s TWSJ has an article chronicling cheating scandals at both the United States Military Academy, located at West Point NY, and the United States Naval Academy, located at Annapolis MD. The article suggests that there are lots of cheaters, but that only a few have been expelled. 

USMA graduates army officers, USNA graduates Navy and Marine Corps (fyi the ‘p’ is silent) officers.
Not only do we know not how far back in time this goes, but it means that not only will our current and future officers be woke, but that they will be dishonorable. 

Exactly what is wanted in a corrupt occupying force.

Home | Wire | The End of the Gold Standard. Fifty Years of Monetary Insanity

The End of the Gold Standard. Fifty Years of Monetary Insanity

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5 COMMENTS

TAGS Gold StandardMoney and Banking3 HOURS AGODaniel Lacalle

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary since Nixon suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold. This began the era of a global fiat money, debt-fueled economy. Since then, crises are more frequent but also shorter and always “solved” by adding more debt and more money printing.

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The suspension of the gold standard was a catalyst for massive global credit expansion and cemented the position of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as it de facto substituted gold as the reserve for the main central banks.

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Thus, since the breakdown of the gold standard, financial crises are more frequent but also shorter than before.

The level of global debt has skyrocketed to more than 350 percent of GDP, and what is mistakenly called “the financial economy,” which is actually the credit-based economy, has multiplied.

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The gold standard supposed a limit to the monetary and fiscal voracity of governments, and suspending it unleashed an unprecedented push to increase indebtedness and the perverse incentive of the states to pass on the current imbalances to future generations.

By substituting gold for the US dollar as a global reserve, the United States has been able to borrow and increase its money supply massively without triggering hyperinflation, because it exports its monetary imbalances to the rest of the world. Other currencies follow the same monetary expansion without the global demand that the US dollar enjoys, so the rising imbalances always end up making those currencies weaker versus the greenback and the economies more dependent on the US dollar.

This race to zero pursued by most central banks has also resulted in there being no real alternative to the US dollar as a reserve, because the rest of the countries abandoned the monetary and fiscal orthodoxy at the same time, weakening their ability to be a world reserve alternative.

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In the 1960s, any currency from a leading country could compete with the dollar if its gold reserves were sufficient. Today, no one among the fiat currencies can compete with the dollar either in financial capacity or as a reserve. The example of the yuan is paradigmatic. The Chinese economy is almost 17 percent of the world’s GDP and its currency is used in less than 4 percent of global transactions, according to the Bank of International Settlements.

With the suspension of the gold standard, Nixon cemented and guaranteed the financial and monetary hegemony of the United States for the long term while unleashing a global credit-fueled economy where financial risk disproportionately exceeds the real economy.

The defenders of the suspension of the gold standard contend that financial crises are shorter and that the global economy has strengthened in the period. However, it is more than debatable that massive debt expansion is the cause of progress. Nonproductive debt has soared and the tax wedge on citizens is elevated, while the severity of financial crises, which are always “solved” by adding more debt and more risk taking, has also increased.

A debt-fueled economy and massive money creation disproportionately benefit the first recipients of money and credit, which are government and the wealthy, creating a larger problem for the middle classes and the poor in accessing better standards of living, given that asset prices are artificially inflated but real wages rise slower than the price of essential expenses like housing, healthcare, and utilities, while taxes rise.Author:

Daniel Lacalle

Daniel Lacalle, PhD, economist and fund manager, is the author of the bestselling books Freedom or Equality (2020), Escape from the Central Bank Trap (2017), The Energy World Is Flat (2015), and Life in the Financial Markets (2014).

He is a professor of global economy at IE Business School in Madrid.

[The US military is being prepped to become an occupying force and not an institution for national service and protection. 556 6.5 9 Cu Ag Au USC Semper Fi]

Air Force Academy Forces Students to Watch Pro-BLM Video

By Eric Lendrum

August 20, 2021

The newest class of cadets at the United States Air Force Academy, as part of their education, are being forced to watch a video that is supportive of the far-left domestic terrorist organization Black Lives Matter, Fox News reports.

The video in question portrays a fictional situation where a mixed-race student named Jose, who has a Nigerian mother and a Mexican father, is pressured into attending a Black Lives Matter rally on his campus by two of his friends. A third friend tries to convince him to not go, instead suggesting that “all lives matter” is a better slogan, since “black lives matter” would suggest to Jose that his mother’s life matters more than his father’s.

At that point, the video is to be paused by the instructor, and students are asked to choose from three different answers that Jose should give; every single answer is critical of the friend and supportive of Black Lives Matter, and in any case, Jose responds by saying that his friend’s comments are “problematic” and “insensitive.”

It was confirmed by the Academy’s Chief of Media Relations, Dean Miller, that the video is, in fact, “required training for inbound cadets (appointees) ahead of their arrival to the U.S. Air Force Academy.” The video is part of the broader far-left initiative by the Biden Administration to implement “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) training throughout the United States Armed Forces. DEI is one of several branches of the broader notion of Critical Race Theory, the debunked claim that all White people are automatically racist, and that America is an inherently racist nation.

After facing growing backlash over multiple similar trainings across different branches, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin lied under oath before Congress and claimed that the Department of Defense does not “teach,” “embrace,” or otherwise support Critical Race Theory. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley has claimed that he doesn’t even know what Critical Race Theory is, but reaffirmed that he supports the idea nevertheless.TwitterFacebookParlerShare onTwitterFacebookParler

Palantir (PLTR) Technologies’ Black Swan

Both The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s have been reporting on the purchase of both crypto-currencies and precious metals by financial institutions. With the accumulation of cash into the trillions of dollars on corporate balance sheets, corporations have begun to do the same. However,

When Palantir Technologies was queried re their purchase last week of $50,000,000.00, in gold (Au) bullion, their response was not a regular financial one, but the dark one, “we’re preparing for a Black Swan Event.” A Black Swan Event is an unforeseen and before the fact unforeseeable catastrophe, although hindsight usually shows that it was seeable and could easily be foreseen and mitigated or even avoided.

With al-Qaeda and The Taliban win in Afghanistan and their integration with Pakistan and its nukes, remember bin Laden was living comfortably in Pakistan with their knowledge, consent, and assistance, it is my assessment that within twelve months at least two nukes will be used against us. Further, without too many details, I think that one of them will be used against our finance industry.

Crypto will be of no avail as one or more of the EMP’s will completely wipe out both the block chains and the purses. With that whole system being digital, it will always fail when does the electricity, and without the appropriate physical back-ups, it becomes un-replaceable.

This leaves precious metals as the only basis for a market economy and safe haven for a portion of your personal wealth.

556, 6.5, 9, Cu, Ag, + Au

God Bless the Constitution of these United States of America

Semper Fi

https://i7.t.hubspotemail.net/e2t/tc/VX7Zg65xZ091W7kXfDF1WdbxBW87_Sgk4wkNWsMZjDWN3q0BhV1-WJV7CgN_GW4dgwX86n9nr_W60r_LC8QnDdBW1rwz7Z7N7hwgVDjZR64pBhh9N52LD_RW_NH9W7GYhky4GRSDnW3zbMGL7ttL63W3Jl72q5lbCz-W31lfBd2zhFkgW8fwNz26JsBzDW4sjd4V7r-4YmW5MFmMh2_Pfs3W72WjfL8Xrh1HW9cj04p90G_vRW64Yw-V8bM57hW8smjGr3zZYSHW5-lnkG1WbHk3W1Lnr034-73RxN36w47SNMnJ2W5wHFT18V25tcW3HPfCZ6RVLCrW1VVMyB7GYcCHW7Rqr3J4ScH3cW7xlXfl5M4qk6W45TR6F23WpLPW4tt7k6929PrQ33Zw1

I keep pushing Janes as THE reputable news source, use the link above and learn why. If I got it right, it should take you directly to the Home Page where you can link to an abbreviated analysis of India’s current defense posture. Kinda important since Kabul’s fall. Really important since Janes was writing twenty years ago about the Taliban-al Qaeda-Afghanistan-Pakistan links and the relationship between Jihadis and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

A personal fyi: with the Taliban now having access to nuclear weapons, and Harris/Biden’s open border policy, ask yourself what’s going to happen if an EMP hits where you live? There’s an earlier post on how to protect your electronics, and, for those of you who’ve assets recorded digitally including crypto-currency, you definitely should make at least 3 hard copies with passwords, pins, and account numbers with positions and balances, and have at least one on hand, one in your safe deposit box, and one in your fireproof home safe.

556, 6.5, 9, Cu, Ag, + Au

God Bless The Constitution of these United States of America.

Semper Fi

Battle Over Gun and Property Rights in South Africa Poses a Warning for America

Posted Thursday, August 12, 2021   |   By AMAC Newsline   |  19 Comments Share Tweet Email

AMAC Exclusive By: Daniel Roman

A government determined to erase constitutional rights to private gun ownership? A crime wave that has seen the country approach warzone levels even before weeks of riots burned more than 1,000 shopping malls to the ground and forced the deployment of the army? A political opposition which stokes racial tensions to encourage the violence? COVID running rampant as the national and local governments accuse each other of politicizing the response? Are we talking about the United States? Thankfully, not this year at least.

But South Africa’s road from laboratory for liberal democracy to near failed state should still concern Americans. While many conservatives in the United States have rightly pointed to the similarities between liberal assaults on individual liberty at home and the underlying trends that led to South Africa’s democratic crisis, the even more urgent reality may be the failure of the world community – and especially the Biden administration – to take what steps it can to recognize and remedy this increasingly alarming situation.

South Africa in 2021, is, to put it simply, in a state of collapse. COVID-19 is now sweeping throughout the country in what is either a fourth or fifth wave depending on who is doing the counting. Officially, COVID is killing between 500 and 700 South Africans per day – the equivalent of 2,500 to 3,500 daily deaths in the United States – but the South African Medical Association suggests the real toll could be around three times higher. This has come despite two national lockdowns which crippled the economy and triggered riots when the government attempted to enforce them by banning alcohol sales. Then, in June, the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma on charges of corruption set off a wave of nationwide riots which forced the deployment of the army and pushed the country toward civil war.

South Africa was already in dire condition before COVID-19 hit, and Mr. Zuma bears a large degree of responsibility for the situation. Zuma was an almost comically corrupt figure, who introduced the term “state capture” into South African discourse by effectively trying to sell the nation’s assets off to a business family of Indian descent, the Guptas. His tenure also saw exponential increases in crime, corruption, and HIV cases. Zuma famously suggested that showering after sexual intercourse could cure AIDs, and bragged about the method’s effectiveness with his many wives.

The African National Congress (ANC), a leftist political party that has won comfortable majorities in the South Africa government since the end of apartheid, removed Zuma in 2018, replacing him with Cyril Ramaphosa. But the victory was a pyrrhic one for “moderates.” Ramaphosa became President, but Zuma’s allies held onto other key positions in the ANC, from which they waged a populist campaign against Ramaphosa, a businessman who owns several mining concerns, attacking him as a capitalist and “white,” despite the fact that Ramaphosa is of African descent.

Zuma supporters also sought to stoke ethnic conflict. Zuma was South Africa’s first and only Zulu President. Ramaphosa, like Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, is Xhosa, and the recent riots have taken on the undertone of a tribal conflict.

The unrest in South Africa is also complicated by an economic component, as the ANC has done little to solve the nation’s financial woes. Instead, they have offered concessions to extremists, such as Julius Malema, the Mugabe-imitating former ANC youth league leader who now heads the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party. Earlier this year, Malema threatened to call on his supporters to join rioters if Ramaphosa called out the army against the rebels. Rather than crushing these domestic terrorists, who see a path to power in stirring up ethnic and racial resentment so they can establish a dictatorship, Ramaphosa and his allies have been appeasing them.

But despite the litany of calamities facing South Africa with regard to crime, COVID, and economic tumult, it was a constitutional crisis which ultimately sparked the most recent round of riots. The ANC had struck a deal with Malema’s EFF to amend the South African Constitution to allow for the seizure of private property without compensation and to remove the right to bear arms from private citizens.

Liberals in the United States have often mocked the idea that there is any link between the right to bear arms and other rights found in the Constitution, like the right to own property, but the ANC and EFF clearly felt differently. That the two reforms were pared demonstrates how inseparable they are. The right to bear arms is the right to defend property. Without it, individuals are entirely dependent on the police to defend their land or property – something made impossible in South Africa by the sheer magnitude of violence rocking the country. In the face of such unrest, South Africans of all races have formed vigilante groups to defend their homes.

This is not what the ANC or its allies want. They want to redistribute land and assets without the need to pay compensation in money they don’t have. The easiest way to do that is if property owners are physically driven off their land by mobs or criminals, at which point the government can claim the land has been abandoned and can therefore be seized without compensation.

While the government has tried to argue the riots “prove” that there are too many guns in South Africa, their effort has instead galvanized the opposition, with more than 200,000 people showing up to local consultations, braving COVID and riots to register their displeasure. The opposition Democratic Alliance declared “the amendments suggested would severely hamper any citizen’s rights to protect themselves – something that cannot be judged lightly, particularly given the wide-spread destruction and chaos that reigned in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng two weeks ago and left residents there to fend for themselves when the South African Police Service (SAPS) and other law enforcement agencies failed utterly to protect communities from violence and looting.” Sound familiar?

South African gun owners – and democracy itself – may receive a stay of execution due to the breakdown in relations between Ramaphosa’s ANC and the EFF following the riots. But Ramaphosa increasingly appears a spent force. He is reliant on the indulgence of the primarily white and mixed race center-right opposition parties to keep him in office out of fear that an even worse option like Malema may take his place, but this is a holding pattern that appears to be postponing the inevitable. They can keep him in office as President for now in exchange for delaying the constitutional changes, but they cannot force the ANC to keep him as party leader. The real danger will come if and when the ANC decides to ally itself with the street, having extracted whatever wealth it can from its middle class and white “allies.”

South Africa is still Africa’s largest economy. Its collapse into a failed state would represent what some would argue to be a geopolitical cataclysm. Given the history of the country, any crack up is not likely to be pretty. Joe Biden and other world leaders need a plan to stop South Africa burning if they hope to prevent a tragedy of vast proportions.

Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

Nuremberg Code

Please read and pass along to friends and family.

http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/nuremberg/

BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL No 7070 Volume 313: Page 1448,
7 December 1996.

CIRP Introduction

The judgment by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg laid down 10 standards to which physicians must conform when carrying out experiments on human subjects in a new code that is now accepted worldwide.

This judgment established a new standard of ethical medical behavior for the post World War II human rights era. Amongst other requirements, this document enunciates the requirement of voluntary informed consent of the human subject. The principle of voluntary informed consent protects the right of the individual to control his own body.

This code also recognizes that the risk must be weighed against the expected benefit, and that unnecessary pain and suffering must be avoided.

This code recognizes that doctors should avoid actions that injure human patients.

The principles established by this code for medical practice now have been extened into general codes of medical ethics.

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The Nuremberg Code (1947)

Permissible Medical Experiments

The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

1.  The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

2.  The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3.  The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results justify the performance of the experiment.

4.  The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

5.  No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

6.  The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

7.  Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.

8.  The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

9.  During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

For more information see Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial, BMJ 1996;313(7070):1445-75.

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Cite as:

• The Nuremberg Code (1947) In: Mitscherlich A, Mielke F. Doctors of infamy: the story of the Nazi medical crimes. New York: Schuman, 1949: xxiii-xxv.

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(File revised 09 June 2002)

[The following is Hickenlooper’s response. Please note that it does not address anything in the original email, but immaturely diverts to his own anti-American agenda.]

Office of U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper <donotreply@hickenlooper.senate.gov>To:klocekws@sbcglobal.netWed, Aug 11 at 12:10 PM

August 11, 2021Dear William, Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the election, the events of January 6th, and the impeachment process. Civic engagement and communication with your representatives is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. I appreciate any and all dialogue as it enables me to better represent Colorado.Let me be clear, on November 3, 2020, the American people – in a free and fair election – chose Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. Independent experts, judges, governors and state election officials from both parties have repeatedly said that there is no evidence of widespread fraud.Some have argued that the events of January 6th, in response to a legitimate election, were an unpredictable anomaly – the result of a peaceful protest gone awry. The reality appears that they were the culmination of the work of a president who has spent the past four years catering to humanity’s worst tendencies and deepening dangerous divisions in our nation. On January 12th , the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a resolution to urge former Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove former President Trump from office, but the former Vice President stated that he would not do so. On January 13th, the House voted 232-197, with the support of 10 Republican members, to impeach former President Trump for inciting violence against the government of the United States.On February 9th, the U.S. Senate began the impeachment trial, and on February 13th, the Senate voted to allow witnesses, which led to Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler’s statement conveying a conversation between Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and former President Donald Trump on January 6th being submitted to the record. That same day, 57 senators – including myself and seven Republicans – voted to convict. While this vote fell 10 votes short of the 67 needed and the former President was acquitted, the bipartisan nature of the vote, and the trial itself, clearly demonstrated that the former President committed reprehensible acts and violated his oath of office. Former President Trump should have resigned and saved the country from this painful exercise.Now is not the time to look backwards, we have so much to do. I’m grateful for the trust and faith Coloradans have placed in me, and will continue working every day to bring your voices to Washington to tackle our country’s most pressing issues. The challenges ahead are grave, but with hard work, common sense, and collaboration we can move forward together and deliver on important issues like the pandemic, jobs, health care, immigration reform, and climate change. We’re excited to get to work and deliver for Coloradans in every corner of the state.We always value hearing directly from Coloradans and hope you will continue to share your thoughts as we work together for Colorado and our country. For more information about our priorities, please visit our website at www.hickenlooper.senate.gov . Again, thank you for reaching out.Sincerely, John Hickenlooper United States Senator

I got my response from Bennett. Bennett’s response was a thank you for writing to him about animal abuse, and as a dog owner he supports my position. Crow’s website does not allow sending him an email (HD 6 CO). USPS has a many month delay to members of congress in order to do a security check.

Literacy, what a concept.

Constituent representing, democracy, what not U.S. gov’t concepts.

A SIGN IN A SHOE REPAIR STORE IN VANCOUVER READS:     

   We will heel you

     We will save your sole

       We will even dye for you.

A SIGN ON A BLINDS AND CURTAIN TRUCK:

     “Blind man driving”

In a Podiatrist’s office:

   “Time wounds all heels.”

On a Septic Tank Truck:

Yesterday’s Meals on Wheels

At an Optometrist’s Office:

“If you don’t see what you’re looking for,

   You’ve come to the right place.”

On a Plumber’s truck:

“We repair what your husband fixed.”

On another Plumber’s truck:

“Don’t sleep with a drip. Call your plumber.”

At a Tire Shop in Milwaukee:

“Invite us to your next blowout.”

On an Electrician’s truck:

  “Let us remove your shorts”

In a Non-smoking Area:

“If we see smoke, we will assume you are on fire and

  will take appropriate action.”

On a Maternity Room door:

      “Push. Push. Push.”

At a Car Dealership:

“The best way to get back on your feet – miss a car payment.”

Outside a Muffler Shop:

“No appointment necessary. We hear you coming”

In a Veterinarian’s waiting room:

“Be back in 5 minutes. Sit! Stay!”

At the Electric Company:

“We would be delighted if you send in your payment on time.

         However, if you don’t, YOU will be de-lighted.”

In a Restaurant window:

“Don’t stand there and be hungry; come on in and get fed up.”

In the front yard of a Funeral Home:

   “Drive carefully. We’ll wait.”

At a Propane Filling Station:

  “Thank Heaven for little grills.”

In a Chicago Radiator Shop:

“Best place in town to take a leak.”

And the best one for last…

Sign on the back of another Septic Tank Truck:

“Caution – This Truck is full of Political Promises”

Gender Ideology Run Amok

June/July 2021 • Volume 50, Number 6/7 • Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier
Author, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

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Abigail Shrier is a journalist and author. She received her A.B. from Columbia College, where she was a Euretta J. Kellett Fellow; her B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Coker Fellow. A member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, she has written for numerous publications, including City Journal, Newsweek, RealClearPolitics, The Federalist, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2021, in Franklin, Tennessee, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.

In 2007, America had one pediatric gender clinic; today there are hundreds. Testosterone is readily available to adolescents from places like Planned Parenthood and Kaiser, often on a first visit—without even a therapist’s note. 

How did we get to this point? How is it that we are all supposed to pretend that the only way you can know I’m a woman is if I tell you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 13-year-old in the State of Washington can begin “gender affirming” therapy without her parents’ consent? How did we get to an America in which a 15-year-old in Oregon can undergo “top surgery”—elective double mastectomy—without her parents’ permission? And what can we do about it?

*** 

To understand how we got to this point, it is useful to begin by considering gender dysphoria—the feeling of severe discomfort in a person’s biological sex. Gender dysphoria is certainly real. It is also exceedingly rare. It afflicts about 0.01 percent of the population, most of whom are male.

For nearly 100 years of diagnostic history, gender dysphoria typically began in early childhood, between the ages of two and four, and usually involved a boy who insisted that he was not a boy but a girl. Children afflicted are insistent, consistent, and persistent in the feeling that they are in the wrong body. It is by all accounts excruciating—I’ve talked to many transgender adults, most of them biological males, who describe the relentless chafe of a body that feels all wrong. 

Historically, this has been the classic presentation of gender dysphoria. When these children were left alone—when no one intervened medically or encouraged what we today call “social transition”—over 70 percent of them naturally outgrew their gender dysphoria. Most of those who outgrew it became gay men. Those who did not outgrow it became what used to be known as transsexuals. They did not believe they were women, but they felt most comfortable presenting themselves as females. 

Today, however, we don’t leave these children alone. Instead, the moment children seem not to be perfectly feminine or perfectly masculine, we label them as “trans kids.” Teachers encourage them to reintroduce themselves to their classes with new names and new pronouns. We take them to therapists or doctors, nearly all of whom practice so-called affirmative care—meaning they think it is their job to affirm the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and help the children medically transition. 

The typical first step in treatment administered to these kids is puberty blockers, which shut down the part of the pituitary gland that directs the release of hormones catalyzing puberty. The most common of these drugs is Lupron, whose original purpose was the chemical castration of sex offenders. To this day, the FDA has never approved this drug for halting healthy puberty. 

One has to wonder why a parent or a doctor would take measures to stop a child’s puberty, given that even a child with genuine gender dysphoria would most likely outgrow that condition if left alone. Some argue that it is traumatizing to let children go through the puberty of the sex to which they do not wish to belong. But in many cases, puberty seems to have helped children overcome gender dysphoria. The truth is that there is no satisfying answer, given that scientists have no way of predicting which children will outgrow the dysphoria on their own and which won’t. 

Proponents of “affirmative care” also argue that allowing puberty to occur is dangerous, because suicide rates for trans-identified youth and trans adults are very high. Therefore, they say, we need to start treating children with gender dysphoria as soon and as dramatically as possible. 

Yet there are no good long-term studies indicating that puberty blockers cure suicidality or even improve mental health. Nor are there studies that show puberty blockers are safe or reversible when used in this manner.

What we do know is that puberty blockers prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, sexual maturation, and bone density. Indeed, because of the inhibition of bone density and other risks, doctors don’t like to keep children on puberty blockers for more than two years.

We also know that in almost every case when a child’s healthy puberty is medically arrested, placing the child out of step with his or her peers, that child proceeds to cross-sex hormones. And when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are administered to a girl, she becomes infertile. She may also have permanent sexual dysfunction given that her sex organs never reach adult maturity.

Given this, the claims made by so many doctors and gender activists today that these medical transition measures for children are safe and reversible—that they are a “pause button,” without serious downsides—are not only dishonest, but destructive. We would not accept this sort of glib salesmanship in any other area of medicine. 

Trans Identification among Teenage Girls

As I mentioned, for the nearly 100-year history of scientific study of gender dysphoria, it has been diagnosed almost exclusively in young children, and mostly in boys. But over the last decade, large numbers of teenage girls have begun to claim they have gender dysphoria. 

Prior to 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on gender dysphoria arising in teenage girls. Dr. Lisa Littman, then a Brown University public health researcher, used the phrase “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to refer to the subsequent sudden spike in transgender identification among teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

This spike is not unique to America—we see it across the Western world. To offer just one statistic, there has been a decade-to-decade increase of over 4,400 percent in the number of teenage girls seeking treatment at the United Kingdom’s national gender clinic. Across the West, teen girls are now the leading demographic claiming to have gender dysphoria. 

What is behind this is social contagion—the spread of ideas, emotions, and behaviors through peer influence, one more instance of teenage girls sharing and spreading their pain. There is a long history of social contagion with this demographic—anorexia and bulimia are also spread this way. And we know that teen girls today are in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record, with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm, and clinical depression. 

The teen girls susceptible to this social contagion are the same high-anxiety, depressive girls who struggle socially in adolescence and tend to hate their bodies. Add to that a school environment where you can achieve status and popularity by declaring a trans identity. Add to that the teenage temptation to stick it to mom. Also add the intoxicating influence of social media, where trans activists push the idea that identifying as trans and starting a course of testosterone will cure a girl’s problems. Put those together, and you have a fast-spreading social phenomenon. 

I’ve spoken to families at top girls’ schools who attest that 15, 20, or in one case 30 percent of the girls in their daughter’s seventh grade class identify as trans. When you see figures like that, you’re witnessing a social contagion in action. There is no other reasonable explanation. 

These teen girls are in a great deal of pain. Almost all of them have at some point dealt with an eating disorder, engaged in cutting, or been diagnosed with other mental health comorbidities. And now they’re being allowed to self-diagnose gender dysphoria by a medical establishment that has decided that its job is to affirm and agree with trans-identified adolescents.

Turning a Blind Eye

You may not know the name Keira Bell. She is a young woman in the U.K., very troubled in adolescence, who was rushed to transition in her teen years and came to regret it. She underwent double mastectomy and spent years on testosterone, only to realize that her problem had never been gender dysphoria. She sued the U.K.’s national gender clinic, and last December, after the High Court of Justice examined her case and the claims of similarly situated plaintiffs, she won. 

The Court examined the medical protocols applied to Keira Bell—protocols identical to the ones we have in the United States—and was horrified that a young girl had been allowed to consent to begin a process of eliminating her future fertility and sexual function at an age, 15, when she could not possibly have gauged that loss.

Hailed as a “landmark case” by The Times of London, The Economist, and even The Guardian, Bell’s victory was widely viewed as a serious condemnation of the effort to fast-track teen girls to gender transition. One of the appalling things the Court noted was that the national gender clinic had been unable to show any psychological improvement in the adolescents it had treated with transitioning hormones. 

If, as I suspect, you haven’t read or heard about the Keira Bell case, that’s because America’s legacy media decided to pretend the case didn’t happen. Similarly, they continue to ignore or dismiss the stories of the thousands of “detransitioners”—young women who underwent medical transition, later regretted it, and attempt to reverse course. A lot of the treatments these girls have undergone are permanent, but they do what they can to try to reverse some of the effects. 

Thus it is that in the United States, this crisis among teenage girls gets treated as a political issue—a conservative issue—rather than a medical one. And so perhaps the greatest medical scandal of our time is dismissed as a conservative preoccupation.

The Assault on Women’s Sports and Safe Spaces

No discussion of gender ideology can ignore the ongoing movement to eradicate girls’ and women’s sports and protective spaces. Many or most of the people pushing this are not transgender themselves. But they are activists, they are energized, and they seem to be winning. 

This movement promotes dangerous bills like the Equality Act, which would make it illegal ever to distinguish between biological men and women—and thus to exclude a biological male from a girls’ sports team or a women’s protective space, whether it be a restroom, locker room, or prison. We have these laws now in California and in the State of Washington—and as you might imagine, one result is that hundreds of biological male prisoners, many of them violent felons, have applied to transfer to women’s units. 

For activists pushing this, it is not enough to create unisex bathrooms, a separate category for trans-identified athletes, or separate safe zones in prisons for trans-identified biological men. No, they are working to abolish all women’s-only spaces and they want to abolish them now. 

***

The common thread running through these topics is that the truth is being obscured by gender ideology. Lies are told about the risks of the transition treatments administered to young children, both to play down the dangers of those treatments and to exaggerate the degree to which those treatments are known to be helpful. Lies are told about the researchers and journalists who attempt to report on the crisis of social contagion among teenage girls undergoing transition treatments. And lies are told about the movement to eradicate women’s protective spaces. 

The gender ideology behind these lies is a sibling of critical race theory. While critical race activists are teaching kids that they are largely defined by their skin color, gender activists are teaching kids that there are a great many genders, and that only they know their true gender. And just as families who object to racial indoctrination in schools are told that their denials of racism are proof of racism, young women who object to biological males participating in girls’ sports are told that their objections are proof of transphobic bigotry. 

These mendacious dogmas have corrupted our K-12 schools, our universities, and our legacy media, as well as our scientific journals and our medical accrediting organizations—the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, etc. To give you a sense of how far things have gone, I was informed late last year by a member of the National Association of Science Writers—an association of journalists with scientific backgrounds—that a member of the association’s online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book on the transgender social contagion among teenage girls. He hadn’t even read my book. He just mentioned that it sounded interesting, and for that he was banned as transphobic. 

Similarly, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and researchers who are concerned about the risks of gender interventions report that they struggle today to get their research published. And public and private funding of research is almost entirely restricted to researchers who promote gender transition and downplay the risks. 

There are phalanxes of young doctors now, many of them in pediatrics or child psychiatry, who are open about their belief that their primary job is “social justice.” They unreservedly celebrate the increase in transitioning treatment of young people and are inexcusably complacent about the risks of those treatments. The Washington Post recently quoted some of these doctors to the effect that puberty blockers are fully reversible—which is not something that any honest doctor can claim to know. We simply don’t have the data to know whether puberty blockers are fully physically reversible when applied to halt healthy puberty—and they are certainly not psychologically reversible. We’re seeing a startling politicization of medicine and science, which is symptomatic of a larger woke corruption of American society.

***

Now, there’s something I make a point of saying whenever I speak, and I say it for the simple reason that it is true: transgender adults are some of the soberest and kindest people I have met in my work as a journalist. Many of them seem to have been helped by transition, and they are leading admirable and productive lives. They have no desire to harm women or to push transition on children. The gender ideology activists do not represent them. 

My understanding of freedom includes a belief that society should allow adults to make consequential decisions about their lives, which includes choosing to undergo sex reassignment surgery. And whenever I am asked by a transgender adult, I use his or her chosen name and pronouns. This seems to me the courteous and the right thing to do. But—and this is a big but—I never lie. This means I never say, and I will never say, that trans women are women. I think reciting this lie leads, as we are seeing, to unjust and dangerous consequences for women and girls. It is not courteous or right to parrot these lies. It is the cowardly surrender of women’s welfare to the woke gods. And it is wrong.

I’m also often asked why it is that the gender ideology activists are doing what they are doing. What possible justification could there be, for instance, for telling small boys that they might be girls and small girls that they might be boys? My best guess at an answer occurred to me while talking to detransitioners. I heard repeatedly from these young women that while they were transitioning, they were angry and politically radical. They often cut off relations with their families, having been coached to do so online by gender activists. Related to this, if you look, you’ll notice a disproportionate number of gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa in cities like Portland. 

In other words, chaos is the point, and these troubled girls become prey for those who seek to recruit revolutionaries. Just as the destructive objective of critical race theory is to divide Americans racially, that of gender ideology is to disrupt the formation of stable families, the building blocks of American life.

So what do we do about it? How do we push back? First and foremost, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in gender ideology. There is no good reason for it, and it does real harm. We can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion. 

Second, we must overcome our squeamishness and speak the truth in public. Wherever we find ourselves, we must refuse to recite lies. And we must always clearly distinguish between transgender Americans, generally wonderful people, and the ideological transgender movement, which seeks to warp children and weaken families. 

This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater harm—no quicker way to bring America to its knees—than by driving our children to do themselves irreversible damage. The people pushing this ideology have gotten a head start on us by perhaps a decade. But now I think they have awakened a sleeping giant. The success of my book is one indication. The many state legislatures that are now debating these issues is another. 

These are our kids and grandkids. Our future depends on our winning this fight.

[Feel free to copy and re-post.]

Archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone

Archbishop of San Francisco

One Peter Yorke Way
San Francisco, CA 94109

Excellency,

May God bless you and your endeavors to maintain the teachings of the Gospel, Canon law, and Catholic social doctrine.  I write this letter to you to encourage you to remain steadfast in these teachings as so many saints and fathers of the Church have throughout the last two millennia. This is an issue that is long overdue for correction and education.  Sadly, as noted in the USCCB report of June 1998, too many Catholics are woefully ignorant of Catholic Social Doctrine, as is blatantly evident that about half of American Catholics voted for candidates who espoused and promoted policies contrary to basic moral principles.

The audacity of 60 Democrat Congressional representatives claiming to “work every day to advance respect for life and the dignity of every human being” while promoting extreme policies supporting abortion and removing protections such as the Hyde Amendment is an egregious violation of Catholic social doctrine and the moral law given to us by God. And it is not just the issue of abortion that is a problem. Their support of gay marriage and transgender policies are undermining the family, which is, according to the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, the basic unit of society established by God as revealed in Genesis and throughout the Bible. Other problem areas include the support of socialism and assisted suicide.

Their continued and blatant denial of the integrity of the human person is in direct opposition to the teaching on those involved in political life is deserving of rebuke. “John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CFD), Doctrinal Note on the Participation of Catholics in Political Life, 4 “Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.” (Catechism 2089, Canon Law 751) And so, their actions, which they try to excuse in this document, actually defines them as heretics.  Heretics are supposed to be denied the Eucharist! (Canon law 915)

I am confounded by the resistance within the clergy and the episcopacy to preparing a document that clearly reiterates these basic moral precepts. Pope Francis has told us we all have a mission which C.S. Lewis stated in Mere Christianity, 26.       “…[T]he church exists for nothing else but to draw man into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy missions, sermons, even the Bible itself are simply a waste of time.” Perhaps this lack of clear guidance and witness on the part of priests and the episcopy partly explains the statistics that for every “new” Catholic 5-8 Catholics leave the Church.

 Jesus expressed infinite mercy but always with a firm hand and with the admonition to “go and sin no more.” There is no sense of remorse or contrition in this document nor any indication that they would endeavor to avoid these sins.  Rather than vote for these policies they could abstain, but, no, they actively support them and boast about it.

Please know that most Catholics who worship regularly know the importance of the Eucharist and its being the “source and summit” of our Catholic life. I am encouraged that some bishops and priests are taking the important step of denying the Eucharist to these heretics and wish that more would step up in support and defense of our Lord, Jesus Christ. I pray that the USCCB will take positive steps to educate the faithful as well as demand that those who continually profane the Blessed Sacrament repent and believe in the Gospel or otherwise not present themselves to the Eucharist.

I keep you, Archbishop Naumann, Archbishop Cordileone, Bishop Strickland and many others in my prayers that you continue to stand strong for our faith.  As descendants of the Apostles and early disciples we look to you for education and guidance.  God Bless You.

Sincerely,